William Morris

The books I would like to print are the books I love to read and keep.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

No man is good enough to be another's master.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.

The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.

Not on one strand are all life's jewels strung.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

O thrush your song is passing sweet But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.

OctoberO love, turn from the changing sea and gaze,Down these grey slopes, upon the year grown old,A-dying 'mid the autumn-scented hazeThat hangeth o'er the hollow in the wold,Where the wind-bitten ancient elms infoldGrey church, long barn, orchard, and red-roofed stead,Wrought in dead days for men a long while dead.Come down, O love; may not our hands still meet,Since still we live today, forgetting June,Forgetting May, deeming October sweet? - - Oh, hearken! hearken! through the afternoonThe grey tower sings a strange old tinkling tune!Sweet, sweet, and sad, the toiling year's last breath,To satiate of life, to strive with death.And we too -will it not be soft and kind,That rest from life, from patience, and from pain,That rest from bliss we know not when we find,That rest from love which ne'er the end can gain?- Hark! how the tune swells, that erewhile did wane!Look up, love! -Ah! cling close, and never move!How can I have enough of life and love?

How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

Let tomorrow cross its own rivers.